Is Bolton Steering Trump into War with Iran?

John Bolton never met a war he didn’t like. If President Trump is serious about stopping U.S. involvement in wars, he’d better find a way to rein in his national security adviser.

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“Stop the ENDLESS WARS!” implored President Donald Trump in a Sunday night tweet.

Well, if he is serious, Trump had best keep an eye on his national security adviser, for a U.S. war on Iran would be a dream come true for John Bolton.

Last September, when Shiite militants launched three mortar shells into the Green Zone in Baghdad, which exploded harmlessly in a vacant lot, Bolton called a series of emergency meetings and directed the Pentagon to prepare a menu of targets, inside Iran, for U.S. air and missile strikes in retaliation.

The Wall Street Journal quoted one U.S. official as saying Bolton’s behavior “rattled people. … People were shocked. It was mind-boggling how cavalier they were about hitting Iran.”

Bolton’s former deputy, Mira Ricardel, reportedly told a gathering the shelling into the Green Zone was “an act of war” to which the U.S. must respond decisively.

Bolton has long believed a U.S. confrontation with Iran is both inevitable and desirable. In 2015, he authored a New York Times op-ed whose title, “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran,” said it all. He has urged that “regime change” in Iran be made a declared goal of U.S. foreign policy.

When Trump announced his decision to withdraw the 2,000 U.S. troops now in Syria, Bolton swiftly imposed conditions: ISIS must first be eliminated, Iranian forces and allied militias must leave, and the Kurds must be protected.

Yet enforcing such red lines would require a permanent presence of American troops. For how, without war, would we effect the removal of Bashar Assad’s Iranian allies, if he declines to expel them and the Iranians refuse to go?

Bolton has an ally in Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. In Cairo last week, Pompeo declared it U.S. policy “to expel every last Iranian boot” from Syria.

And though Hezbollah has been a “major presence” in Lebanon for several decades, “we won’t accept this as the status quo,” said Pompeo, for Hezbollah is a “wholly owned subsidiary of the Iranian regime.”

But how does the secretary of state propose to push Hezbollah out of Lebanon peacefully when the Israelis could not do it in a month-long war in 2006?

Pompeo’s purpose during his tour of the Middle East? Build a new Middle East Strategic Alliance, a MESA, an Arab NATO, whose members are to be Egypt, Jordan and the nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

There are other signs a confrontation is coming soon. The U.S. has objected to Iran’s pending launch of two space satellites, saying these look like tests of missiles designed to deliver nuclear warheads. Yet Iran has never produced weapons-grade uranium or plutonium and never tested an ICBM.

Pompeo has also called for a conclave in Poland in February to bring together an anti-Iran alliance to discuss what is to be done about what he calls “our common enemy.”

Over the weekend, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu boasted of Israel’s latest strike in Syria: “Just in the last 36 hours, the air force attacked Iranian warehouses with Iranian weapons at the international airport in Damascus. The accumulation of recent attacks proves that we are determined more than ever to take action against Iran in Syria, just as we promised.”

Israel brags that it has hit 200 targets inside Syria in recent years. The boasting may be connected to Bibi’s desire to strengthen his credentials as a security hawk for the coming Israeli election. But it is also a provocation to the Iranians and Syrians to retaliate, which could ignite a wider war between Israel and Syrian and Iranian forces.

What does the U.S. think of the Israeli strikes? Said Pompeo: “We strongly support Israel’s efforts to stop Iran from turning Syria into the next Lebanon.”

In short, forces are moving in this country and in Israel to bring about a U.S. confrontation with Iran — before our troops leave Syria.

But the real questions here are not about Bolton or Pompeo.

They are about Trump. Was he aware of Bolton’s request for a menu of targets in Iran for potential U.S. strikes? Did he authorize it? Has he authorized his national security adviser and secretary of state to engage in these hostile actions and bellicose rhetoric aimed at Iran? And if so, why?

While Trump has urged that the U.S. pull out of these Mideast wars, Pompeo has corrected him, “When America retreats, chaos often follows.”

Is Trump looking for a showdown with Iran, which could result in a war that might vault his approval rating, but be a disaster for the Middle East and world economy and do for him what Operation Iraqi Freedom did for George W. Bush?

One thing may confidently be said of the rhetoric and actions of Bolton and Pompeo: This is not what brought out the new populists who made Donald Trump president, the people who still share his desire to “stop the endless wars.”

Pat Buchanan is a writer, political commentator and presidential candidate. He is the author of Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever and previous titles including The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? and Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War, all available from the AFP Online Store.

COPYRIGHT 2017 CREATORS.COM

Armchair Warriors for Zion

The U.S. government is bursting with lackeys who place Israel, not America, first. While Jared Kushner, Mike Pompeo, and John Bolton are ever busy ensuring U.S. foreign policy considers Israel first, now Kenneth Marcus at the Department of Education is working to eliminate any ideas that might prevent the foreign nation holding first priority in our students’ minds, as well.

By Philip Giraldi

I have recently written about how American Jews who are protective of Israel have succeeded in inserting themselves in the U.S. government at various choke points where the bilateral relationship between Tel Aviv and Washington are managed. The Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (OTFI) in the Treasury Department, for instance, is notable in that regard, as it has been a Jewish enclave since its founding under George W. Bush in 2004. Since that time, it has successfully ignored Israeli violations of law to include its nuclear program and colonization of the West Bank while increasing penalties inflicted on countries like Iran, regarded as hostile to Israel. Nor should one forget the Jewish cabal that was largely responsible for the Iraq war, which proved disastrous to genuine American interests.

Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon together with Scooter Libby at the White House were responsible for the phony intelligence that was stove-piped up to policy makers to make it look as if Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and was a threat to the United States. Air Force Col. Karen Kwiatkowski has reported how neoconservatives corrupted the intelligence analysis process. Meanwhile Israeli intelligence officers, diplomats, and military personnel were able to move around the Pentagon freely, having special access granted to them by Feith.

As it turned out, there were no such weapons and the only beneficiaries of a shattered Iraq were Israel and Iran. Currently, many of the same people, who in no way suffered career-wise for their poor judgment and their collaboration with a foreign country, are pushing all available buttons to bring about a much bigger war in Syria and a new conflict with Iran. The new policy, spelled out by National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on recent trips to Israel, demands the ouster of Iranians from Syrian territory and regime change in Damascus. It will require a U.S. armed presence in Syria for years to come.

Syria will thereby become the next Afghanistan and Iraq, dysfunctional countries all in a row that once upon a time were both independent and stable. Nowhere has the United States “won” in any sense, and the occupations appear to be interminable. You can blame the dunderheads in Washington for the policy failure, but you must also blame Israel.

One should not ignore the interminable so-called Middle East peace process, either, which is all about protecting Israeli interests. It is being run by presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner and a team of Orthodox Jews negotiating with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, is also an Orthodox Jew with a rabbi as his principal advisor. Friedman spends his days defending Israel, even when it shoots dead 70 unarmed demonstrating Gazans.

Recent policy initiatives by the White House have consisted of cutting off all funding to Palestinian refugees in an attempt to make them either surrender or disappear, preferably both. It is a policy dictated by Israel, which provides no benefits to the United States. Bolton, in his recent condemnation of the International Criminal Court, tied the refusal to recognize the court and the closure of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Washington to attempts to hold Israel accountable for war crimes, meaning American policy is being driven by Israeli interests.

The most recent bit of Israel-first policy in the Trump administration involves the Education Department. As some university students are actually capable of thinking independently and are rejecting the standard Israeli fabricated line about how it is the “only democracy in the Middle East” and “America’s best and truest ally,” both of which are manifestly untrue, it was perhaps inevitable that the government Zionists who are intent on protecting Israel would turn to shutting down any criticism of the Jewish state on campus. There was, however, a little problem sometimes referred to as the First Amendment, guaranteeing free speech. So along comes Kenneth Marcus, and he finds a nice little niche in the government where he can work to stop the process whereby Jewish students, so it is being claimed, are being made uncomfortable by criticism of Israel.

Marcus has been the assistant secretary of education for civil rights since June, which gives him authority to enforce what he chooses to define as the rights of students at universities. The position is quite powerful in that any university or college receiving federal funds can be deprived of that income if it is found to be in violation of the rules that Marcus chooses to enforce.

Marcus is an ardent Zionist, who has frequently been in the news opposing Palestinian groups on campus. His appointment is a major shift in how the Department of Education sees its role in serving as thought police at America’s institutions of higher learning.

It is not as if Marcus’s views were unknown before he was appointed. He previously served as head of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which he founded in 2011 “to combat the resurgence of anti-Semitism in American higher education.” He was an outspoken advocate for all things Israeli and Jewish, with particular focus on silencing the Palestinian-led nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), which Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have perhaps correctly identified as the biggest threat to their country. Netanyahu, of course, defines a threat as anything that prevents him from dispossessing the Palestinians of the remainder of their land and inducing or forcing them to move elsewhere.

The BDS movement is indeed popular among university students in the United States and also in Europe, as it combines nonviolence with an assertion of the rights of the Palestinian people.

Marcus has reopened a case dismissed in 2014 that was initiated seven years ago by a Zionist group against Rutgers University, claiming that the school permitted a “hostile environment” for Jewish students. Investigation by the Obama administration Department of Education determined that that was not so, but Marcus thinks otherwise, revealing his turnaround decision in a letter to his allies at the Zionist Organization of America.

Marcus’s office does not have jurisdiction over religious discrimination, but it does “aggressively enforce” civil rights “which prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity or national origin.” So he is calling Jews an “ethnicity” linked to Israel as a “right to self-determination.” Any criticism of the existence of Israel then becomes anti-Semitism and also racist, making the promotion of the Palestinian cause hate speech and therefore subject to being banned on campus.

More than 200 civil rights groups objected to the appointment of Marcus but the Senate nevertheless confirmed the assignment by a 50 to 46 vote. That a partisan like Marcus would be considered as an enforcer of civil rights is a travesty, as he, like many other Jewish Zionists in senior government positions in the Trump administration, are only interested in what they think benefits Israel.

Philip Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer and a columnist and television commentator. He is also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest. Other articles by Giraldi can be found on the website of the Unz Review.

Is U.S. Bellicosity Backfiring?

With the Singapore summit now scuttled, North Korea issuing vaguely threatening references to nuclear war in response to VP Mike Pence’s incendiary remarks, and Mike Pompeo issuing outrageous “demands” of Iran, it’s looking more and more like the neocon warmongers’ complete victory over Donald Trump’s grand America-first goals is imminent.

By Patrick J. Buchanan

U.S. threats to crush Iran and North Korea may yet work, but as of now neither Tehran nor Pyongyang appears to be intimidated.

Repeated references by NSC adviser John Bolton and Vice President Mike Pence to the “Libya model” for denuclearization of North Korea just helped sink the Singapore summit of President Trump and Kim Jong Un. To North Korea, the Libya model means the overthrow and murder of Libya strongman Col. Gadhafi, after he surrendered his WMD.

Wednesday, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui exploded at Pence’s invocation of Libya: “Vice-President Pence has made unbridled and impudent remarks that North Korea might end like Libya. . . . I cannot suppress my surprise at such ignorant and stupid remarks.

“Whether the U.S. will meet us at a meeting room or encounter us at nuclear-to-nuclear showdown is entirely dependent upon the decision and behavior of the United States.”

Yesterday, Trump canceled the Singapore summit.

Earlier this week at the Heritage Foundation, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid out our Plan B for Iran in a speech that called to mind Prussian Field Marshal Karl Von Moltke.

Among Pompeo’s demands: Iran must end all support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza, withdraw all forces under Iranian command in Syria, and disarm its Shiite militia in Iraq.

Iran must confess its past lies about a nuclear weapons program and account publicly for all such activity back into the 20th century.

Iran must halt all enrichment of uranium, swear never to produce plutonium, shut down its heavy water reactor, open up its military bases to inspection to prove it has no secret nuclear program, and stop testing ballistic missiles.

And unless Iran submits, she will be strangled economically.

What Pompeo delivered was an ultimatum: Iran is to abandon all its allies in all Mideast wars, or face ruin and possible war with the USA.

It is hard to recall a secretary of state using the language Pompeo deployed: “We will track down Iranian operatives and their Hezbollah proxies operating around the world and crush them. Iran will never again have carte blanche to dominate the Middle East.”

But how can Iran “dominate” a Mideast that is home to Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Egypt, as well as U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, and Syria?

To Iran’s east is a nuclear-armed Pakistan. To its west is a nuclear-armed U.S. Fifth Fleet and a nuclear-armed Israel. Iran has no nukes, no warships to rival ours, and a 1970s air force.

Yet, this U.S.-Iran confrontation, triggered by Trump’s trashing of the nuclear deal and Pompeo’s ultimatum, is likely to end one of three ways:

First, Tehran capitulates, which is unlikely, as President Hassan Rouhani retorted to Pompeo: “Who are you to decide for Iran and the world? We will continue our path with the support of our nation.” Added Ayatollah Khamenei, “Iran’s presence in the region is our strategic depth.”

Second, Iran defies U.S. sanctions and continues to support its allies in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen. This would seem likely to lead to collisions and war.

Third, the U.S. could back off its maximalist demands, as Trump backed off Bolton’s demand that Kim Jong Un accept the Libyan model of total and verifiable disarmament before any sanctions are lifted.

While our NATO allies are incensed by Trump’s threat to impose secondary sanctions if they do not re-impose sanctions on Tehran, the Europeans are likely to cave in to America’s demands. For Europe to choose Iran over a U.S. that has protected Europe since the Cold War began and is an indispensable market for Europe’s goods would be madness.

Vladimir Putin appears to want no part of an Iran-Israel or U.S.-Iran war and has told Bashar Assad that Russia will not be selling Damascus his S-300 air defense system. Putin has secured his bases in Syria and wants to keep them.

As for the Chinese, she will take advantage of the West’s ostracism of Iran by drawing Iran closer to her own orbit.

Is there a compromise to be had?

Perhaps, for some of Pompeo’s demands accord with the interests of Iran, which cannot want a war with the United States, or with Israel, which would likely lead to war with the United States.

Iran could agree to release Western prisoners, move Shiite militia in Syria away from the Golan Heights, accept verifiable restrictions on tests of longer-range missiles, and establish deconfliction rules for U.S. and Iranian warships in the Persian Gulf.

Reward: aid from the West and renewed diplomatic relations with the United States.

Surely, a partial, verifiable nuclear disarmament of North Korea is preferable to war on the peninsula. And, surely, a new nuclear deal with Iran with restrictions on missiles is preferable to war in the Gulf.

Again, we cannot make the perfect the enemy of the good.

Pat Buchanan is a writer, political commentator and presidential candidate. He is the author of Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever and previous titles including The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority. His books are available at the AFP Online Store.

COPYRIGHT 2017 CREATORS.COM

A Trump Doctrine for Singapore and Beyond

The upcoming Singapore Summit offers an opportunity to significantly decrease the world’s threat of nuclear disaster and end decades of “frozen conflict” on the Korean Peninsula. Buchanan suggests President Trump would do best to have a backup plan to include some concessions, as will be expected by Kim, and to not push the typical John Bolton war mongering “all-or-nothing” mantra if he wishes to succeed.

By Patrick J. Buchanan

After Pyongyang railed this week that the U.S.-South Korean Max Thunder military drills were a rehearsal for an invasion of the North, and imperiled the Singapore summit, the Pentagon dialed them back.

The B-52 exercises alongside F-22 stealth fighters were canceled.

But Pyongyang had other objections.

Sunday, NSC adviser John Bolton spoke of a “Libyan model” for the North’s disarmament, referring to Moammar Gadhafi’s surrender of all his weapons of mass destruction in 2004. The U.S. was invited into Libya to pick them up and cart them off, whereupon sanctions were lifted.

As Libya was subsequently attacked by NATO and Gadhafi lynched, North Korea denounced Bolton and all this talk of the “Libyan model” of unilateral disarmament.

North Korea wants a step-by-step approach, each concession by Pyongyang to be met by a U.S. concession. And Bolton sitting beside Trump, and across the table from Kim Jong Un in Singapore, may be inhibiting.

What was predictable and predicted has come to pass.

If we expected Kim to commit at Singapore to Bolton’s demand for “complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization,” and a swift follow-through, we were deluding ourselves.

At Singapore, both sides will have demands, and both will have to offer concessions, if there is to be a deal.

What does Kim Jong Un want?

An end to U.S. and South Korean military exercises and sanctions on the North, trade and investment, U.S. recognition of his regime, a peace treaty, and the eventual removal of U.S. bases and troops.

He is likely to offer an end to the testing of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, no transfer of nuclear weapons or strategic missiles to third powers, a drawdown of troops on the DMZ, and the opening of North Korea’s borders to trade and travel.

As for his nuclear weapons and the facilities to produce them, these are Kim’s crown jewels. These brought him to the attention of the world and the Americans to the table. These are why President Trump is flying 10,000 miles to meet and talk with him.

And, unlike Gadhafi, Kim is not going to give them up.

Assuming the summit comes off June 12, this is the reality Trump will face in Singapore: a North Korea willing to halt the testing of nukes and ICBMs and to engage diplomatically and economically.

As for having Americans come into his country, pick up his nuclear weapons, remove them, and begin intrusive inspections to ensure he has neither nuclear bombs nor the means to produce, deliver or hide them, that would be tantamount to a surrender by Kim.

Trump is not going to get that. And if he adopts a Bolton policy of “all or nothing,” he is likely to get nothing at all.

Yet, thanks to Trump’s threats and refusal to accept a “frozen conflict” on the Korean peninsula, the makings of a real deal are present, if Trump does not make the perfect the enemy of the good.

For there is nothing North Korea is likely to demand that cannot be granted, as long as the security of South Korea is assured to the degree that it can be assured, while living alongside a nuclear-armed North.

Hence, when Kim cavils or balks in Singapore, as he almost surely will, at any demand for a pre-emptive surrender of his nuclear arsenal, Trump should have a fallback position.

If we cannot have everything we want, what can we live with?

Moreover, while we are running a risk today, an intransigent North Korea that walks out would be running a risk as well.

A collapse in talks between Kim and the United States and Kim and South Korea would raise the possibility that he and his Chinese patrons could face an East Asia Cold War where South Korea and Japan also have acquired nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.

In the last analysis, the United States should be willing to accept both the concessions to the North that the South is willing to make and the risks from the North that the South is willing to take.

For, ultimately, they are the one who are going to have to live on the same peninsula with Kim and his nukes.

Trump ran on a foreign policy that may fairly be described as a Trump Doctrine: In the post-post-Cold War era, the United States will start looking out for America first.

This does not mean isolationism or the abandonment of our allies. It does mean a review and reassessment of all the guarantees we have issued to go to war on behalf of other countries, and the eventual transfer of responsibility for the defense of our friends over to our friends.

In the future, the U.S. will stop futilely imploring allies to do more for their own defense and will begin telling them that their defense is primarily their own responsibility. Our allies must cease to be our dependents.

Pat Buchanan is a writer, political commentator and presidential candidate. He is the author of Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever and previous titles including The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority. Both are available from the AFP Online Store.

COPYRIGHT 2017 CREATORS.COM

Are Bibi and Bolton in the Wheel House Now?

Pat Buchanan asks, and with good reason given President Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, “Is the foreign policy that America Firsters voted for being replaced by the Middle East agenda of Bibi and the neoconservatives?”

Prime Minister Theresa May of Great Britain, President Emmanuel Macron of France, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel were put on notice that their ties to Iran are to be severed, or secondary sanctions will be imposed on them.

The neocons who sought his political extinction in 2016, the royals of the Gulf, Bibi Netanyahu, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The IRGC had warned Iranians that the Americans were duplicitous.

When Trump finished speaking, Bibi launched strikes on Iranian bases in Syria, and flew to Moscow to persuade Vladimir Putin not to give the Iranians any air defense against Israeli attacks.

Iranian forces responded with 20 missiles fired at the Golan, which ignited a massive Israeli counterstrike Thursday night, a 70-missile attack on Iranian bases in Syria.

We appear to be at the beginning of a new war, and how it ends we know not. But for Bibi and National Security Adviser John Bolton, the end has always been clear—the smashing of Iran and regime change.

Tuesday, Trump warned that Iran is on “a quest for nuclear weapons,” and “if we do nothing . . . in just a short period of time, the world’s worst sponsor of state terror will be on the cusp of acquiring the world’s most dangerous weapon.”

And where is the evidence for this Bush-like assertion?

If Iran is on a “quest” for nukes, why did 17 U.S. intel agencies, “with high confidence,” in 2007 and 2011, say Iran did not even have a nuclear weapons program?

Saddam Hussein could not convince us he had no WMD, because the nonexistent WMD were the pretext, the casus belli, for doing what the War Party had already decided to do: invade Iraq.

We were lied into that war. And how did it turn out?

Why has the Foreign Relations committee not called in the heads of the U.S. intelligence agencies and asked them flat out: Does Iran have an active nuclear bomb program, or is this a pack of lies to stampede us into another war?

If Iran is on a quest for nukes, let the intel agencies tell us where the work is being done, so we can send inspectors and show the world.

Efforts to pull us back from being dragged into a new war have begun.

The Europeans are begging Iran to abide by the terms of the nuclear deal, even if the Americans do not. But the regime of Hassan Rouhani, who twice defeated Ayatollah-backed candidates, is in trouble.

The nuclear deal and opening to the West were the reasons the children of the Green Movement of 2009 voted for Rouhani. If his difficulties deepen because of reimposed U.S. and Western sanctions, his great achievement, the nuclear deal, will be seen by his people as the failed gamble of a fool who trusted the Americans.

Should Rouhani’s regime fall, we may get a Revolutionary Guard regime rather less to the liking of everyone, except for the War Party, which could seize upon that as a pretext for war.

What happens next is difficult to see.

Iran does not want a war with Israel in Syria that it cannot win.

Iran’s ally, Hezbollah, which just swept democratic elections in Lebanon, does not want a war with Israel that would bring devastation upon the nation it now leads.

The Russians don’t want a war with Israel or the Americans.

But as Putin came to the rescue of a Syria imperiled by ISIS and al Qaeda, to save his ally from a broad insurgency, he is not likely to sit impotently and watch endless air and missile strikes on Syria.

Trump has said U.S. troops will be getting out of Syria. But Bolton and the generals appear to have walked him back.

There are reports we are reinforcing the Kurds in Manbij on the west bank of the Euphrates, though President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has demanded that the Kurds vacate all Syrian border towns with Turkey.

Americans are also reportedly on the border of Yemen, assisting Saudi Arabia in locating the launch sites of the rockets being fired at Riyadh by Houthi rebels in retaliation for the three years of savage Saudi assault on their country.

Meanwhile, the news out of Afghanistan, our point of entry into the Near East wars almost a generation ago, is almost all bad—most of it about terrorist bombings of Afghan troops and civilians.

Is the foreign policy that America Firsters voted for being replaced by the Middle East agenda of Bibi and the neoconservatives? So it would appear.

Pat Buchanan is a writer, political commentator and presidential candidate. He is the author of Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever and previous titles including The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority. Both are available from the AFP Online Store.

COPYRIGHT 2017 CREATORS.COM

Bolton Should Be Denied Clearance

Newly appointed national security advisor John Bolton is anything but new when it comes to his efforts to foment war—anywhere and everywhere possible. Phil Giraldi says the warmonger Bolton, “supremely sure of himself and possessing a tendency to do what he considers expedient without regard for consequences, cannot be relied upon to do the right thing when it comes to national security” and, based on his record, should not be given security clearance.

By Philip Giraldi

Much of the criticism of the appointment of John Bolton as national security advisor focuses on his record as a warmonger, a man who believes that any complex foreign problem can and should be resolved by force in support of the principle that the United States knows best how other countries should govern themselves.

The Israeli liberal newspaper Ha’aretz, dismayed over how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government were overjoyed at the appointment, described Bolton as “Dr. Strangelove with a whiff of Apocalypse Now,” before observing ruefully how he “has yet to meet a war he didn’t love, a rival he didn’t want to destroy, an enemy he didn’t seek to blow to smithereens, and an international conflict he didn’t believe could be solved by force of arms. He denigrates diplomacy, maligns multilateral organizations, yearns for the days, if they ever existed, that America told the world what to do and everyone saluted.”

Bolton, a leading architect of the Iraq war, rightly described as America’s worst foreign policy blunder ever, endorses that decision to this day. But it was more than a blunder. It was a war crime that in turn produced many other crimes to include torture, rendition, and black site prisons.Bolton’s inability to recognize defeat and failure marks him as an intelligent man locked into his own worldview who is completely unable to learn from his mistakes.

For the past 15 years, Bolton has consistently advocated bombing Iran and has connived at creating some casus belli, by false flag if necessary, to initiate fighting. He has even pressured America’s hawkish United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley to contrive some kind of confrontation to kill the successful Iran nuclear deal. Bolton’s nomination has many Americans rightly alarmed that he might initiate yet another endless cycle of costly and bloody military engagement in the Mideast.

Beyond the general concerns, however, one might consider Bolton’s impending access to the most highly classified intelligence information that the United States possesses due to his close personal relationship with Israel and its government, which appears to have included divulging classified information in the past. The Israeli connection is particularly sensitive because of the role of casino billionaire GOP funder Sheldon Adelson, who supported some of Bolton’s initiatives after he left the State Department in 2006. Bolton certainly knows how to return a favor, approving of Adelson’s suggestion to detonate a nuclear bomb in the Iranian desert, just to warn the Mullahs what might be coming.

Bolton’s regard for Israel has included activity that might have involved unauthorized disclosure of classified information when he was undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. He collaborated with the Israelis, often without telling his superiors in the State Department, to create a justification for a U.S. attack on Iran. The strategy to bring about a war included diplomatic pressure, crude propaganda, and the production of fabricated evidence by Mossad.

Despite the fact that Bolton was technically under the supervision of Secretary of State Colin Powell, he violated existing State Department regulations by taking a series of secret trips to Israel in 2003 and 2004 without the required clearance from the State Department’s Bureau for Near Eastern Affairs. Thus, when Powell was saying administration policy was not to attack Iran, Bolton was working with the Israelis to prepare for just such a war. During a February 2003 visit, Bolton assured Israeli officials in private meetings that he was certain that the United States would attack Iraq to take down Saddam before dealing with Iran as well as Syria.

During multiple trips to Israel, Bolton had unannounced meetings, including with the head of Mossad, Meir Dagan, without the usual reporting cable to the secretary of state. Those meetings involved crafting a joint strategy to bring about political conditions supporting an eventual U.S. strike against the Iranians.

Bolton, while serving as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, also supplied Israel with crucial information on American plans at the UN so as to redirect U.S. policy. Dan Gillerman, who served as Israel’s ambassador to the UN in 2006 when Bolton was U.S. ambassador, has described how “in more than one case, Ambassador Bolton called me and alerted me to the fact that his mission—the United States mission to the UN—was about to vote against Israel and asked that I alert the prime minister, who at that time was Ehud Olmert. In more than one case the prime minister called the president, who was then George W. Bush, and got him to overrule the State Department.”

Bolton was working with Israel to subvert positions being supported by the U.S. government, as in August 2006 when the UN Security Council was considering Resolution 1701, to end a month-long war between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Bolton warned the Israelis that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice planned to support the initiative. Gillerman reports, “In that case John Bolton got in touch with me at about 8 o’clock in the evening, which was 3 in the morning in Israel, calling to say ‘You have to call your prime minister and tell him that Condi Rice sold you out to the French.’ ”

All of the above is now part of the public record on Bolton. Some might consider what he did as treasonous. Given what we know about his last experience of high office, he should never again be cleared to have access to classified information since he would likely abuse that privilege to satisfy his own agenda. Bolton, supremely sure of himself and possessing a tendency to do what he considers expedient without regard for consequences, cannot be relied upon to do the right thing when it comes to national security. He should never be granted a security clearance and should never be placed in a position of authority that would again permit him to do mischief. Unfortunately, however, urging President Donald Trump to reverse the Bolton decision because of the grave damage it will inevitably do to the United States is not likely be received favorably by the White House.

Philip Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer and a columnist and television commentator. He is also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest. Other articles by Giraldi can be found on the website of the Unz Review.

Has the War Party Hooked Trump?

Following reports of an alleged gas attack on civilians in Syria, President Trump threatened Bashar Assad, via Twitter, with paying a “big price.” This in spite of just recently announcing the U.S. would be withdrawing troops from Syria. Is he bluffing? Or did he just further extend U.S. involvement in this foreign civil war.

By Patrick J. Buchanan

With his Sunday tweet that Bashar Assad, “Animal Assad,” ordered a gas attack on Syrian civilians, and Vladimir Putin was morally complicit in the atrocity, President Donald Trump just painted himself and us into a corner.

Now, either Trump launches an attack that could drag us deeper into a seven-year civil war from which he promised to extricate us last week, or Trump is mocked as being a man of bluster and bluff.

For Trump Sunday accused Barack Obama of being a weakling for failing to strike Syria after an earlier chemical attack.

“If President Obama had crossed his stated Red Line In The Sand,” Trump tweeted, “the Syrian disaster would have ended long ago! Animal Assad would have been history!”

Trump’s credibility is now on the line and he is being goaded by the war hawks to man up. Sunday, John McCain implied that Trump’s comments about leaving Syria “very soon” actually “emboldened” Assad:

“President Trump last week signaled to the world that the United States would prematurely withdraw from Syria. Bashar Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers have heard him, and emboldened by American inaction, Assad has reportedly launched another chemical attack against innocent men, women and children, this time in Douma.”

Pronouncing Assad a “war criminal,” Lindsey Graham said Sunday the entire Syrian air force should be destroyed.

So massive an attack would be an act of war against a nation that has not attacked us and does not threaten us. Hence, Congress, prior to such an attack, should pass a resolution authorizing a U.S. war on Syria.

And, as Congress does, it can debate our objectives in this new war, and how many men, casualties, and years will be required to defeat the coalition of Syria, Russia, Hezbollah, Iran, and the allied Shiite militias from the Near East.

On John Bolton’s first day as national security adviser, Trump is being pushed to embrace a policy of Cold War confrontation with Russia and a U.S. war with Syria. Yet candidate Trump campaigned against both.

The War Party that was repudiated in 2016 appears to be back in the saddle. But before he makes good on that threat of a “big price . . . to pay,” Trump should ask his advisers what comes after the attack on Syria.

Lest we forget, there was a reason Obama did not strike Syria for a previous gas attack. Americans rose up as one and said we do not want another Middle East war.

When John Kerry went to Capitol Hill for authorization, Congress, sensing the national mood, declined to support any such attack.

Trump’s strike, a year ago, with 59 cruise missiles, on the air base that allegedly launched a sarin gas attack, was supported only because Trump was new in office and the strike was not seen as the beginning of a longer and deeper involvement in a war Americans did not want to fight.

Does Trump believe that his political base is more up for a major U.S. war in Syria today than it was then?

The folks who cheered Trump a week ago when he said we were getting out of Syria, will they cheer him if he announces that we are going deeper in?

Before any U.S. attack, Trump should make sure there is more hard evidence that Assad launched this poison gas attack than there is that Russia launched that poison gas attack in Salisbury, England.

One month after that attack, which Prime Minister Theresa May ascribed to Russia and Foreign Minister Boris Johnson laid at the feet of Putin himself, questions have arisen:

If the nerve agent used, Novichok, was of a military variety so deadly it could kill any who came near, why is no one dead from it?

Both the target, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia are recovering.

If the deadly poison was, as reported, put on the doorknob of Skripal’s home, how did he and Yulia manage to go to a restaurant after being contaminated, with neither undergoing a seizure until later on a park bench?

If Russia did it, why are the British scientists at Porton Down now admitting that they have not yet determined the source of the poison?

Why would Putin, with the prestige of hosting the World Cup in June on the line, perpetrate an atrocity that might have killed hundreds and caused nations not only to pull out of the games, but to break diplomatic relations with Russia?

U.S. foreign policy elites claim Putin wanted Trump to win the 2016 election. But if Putin indeed wanted to deal with Trump, why abort all such prospects with a poison gas murder of a has-been KGB agent in Britain, America’s foremost ally?

The sole beneficiaries of the gas attacks in Salisbury and Syria appear to be the War Party.

Pat Buchanan is a writer, political commentator and presidential candidate. He is the author of Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Foreverand previous titles including The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority. Both are available from the AFP Online Store.

COPYRIGHT 2017 CREATORS.COM

Is Trump Assembling a War Cabinet?

It would seem President Trump does not remember the history Candidate Trump seemed to understand, given his choices of cabinet members who support war and more war and seem intent on bombing Iran—sooner than later.

By Patrick J. Buchanan

The last man standing between the U.S. and war with Iran may be a four-star general affectionately known to his Marines as “Mad Dog.”

Gen. James Mattis, the secretary of defense, appears to be the last man in the Situation Room who believes the Iran nuclear deal may be worth preserving and that war with Iran is a dreadful idea.

Yet, other than Mattis, President Donald Trump seems to be creating a war cabinet.

Trump himself has pledged to walk away from the Iran nuclear deal—”the worst deal ever”—and reimpose sanctions in May.

His new national security adviser John Bolton, who wrote an op-ed titled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran,” has called for preemptive strikes and “regime change.”

Secretary of State-designate Mike Pompeo calls Iran “a thuggish police state,” a “despotic theocracy,” and “the vanguard of a pernicious empire that is expanding its power and influence across the Middle East.”

Bibi Netanyahu is monomaniacal on Iran, calling the nuclear deal a threat to Israel’s survival and Iran “the greatest threat to our world.”

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley echoes them all.

Yet Iran appears not to want a war. UN inspectors routinely confirm that Iran is strictly abiding by the terms of the nuclear deal.

While U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf often encountered Iranian “fast attack” boats and drones between January 2016 and August 2017, that has stopped. Vessels of both nations have operated virtually without incident.

What would be the result of Trump’s trashing of the nuclear deal?

First would be the isolation of the United States.

China and Russia would not abrogate the deal but would welcome Iran into their camp. England, France, and Germany would have to choose between the deal and the U.S. And if Airbus were obligated to spurn Iran’s orders for hundreds of new planes, how would that sit with the Europeans?

How would North Korea react if the U.S. trashed a deal where Iran, after accepting severe restrictions on its nuclear program and allowing intrusive inspections, were cheated of the benefits the Americans promised?

Why would Pyongyang, having seen us attack Iraq, which had no WMD, and Libya, which had given up its WMD to mollify us, ever consider giving up its nuclear weapons—especially after seeing the leaders of both nations executed?

And, should the five other signatories to the Iran deal continue with it despite us, and Iran agree to abide by its terms, what do we do then?

Find a casus belli to go to war? Why? How does Iran threaten us?

A war, which would involve U.S. warships against swarms of Iranian torpedo boats, could shut down the Persian Gulf to oil traffic and produce a crisis in the global economy. Anti-American Shiite jihadists in Beirut, Baghdad, and Bahrain could attack U.S. civilian and military personnel.

As the Army and Marine Corps do not have the troops to invade and occupy Iran, would we have to reinstate the draft?

And if we decided to blockade and bomb Iran, we would have to take out all its anti-ship missiles, submarines, navy, air force, ballistic missiles, and air defense system.

And would not a pre-emptive strike on Iran unite its people in hatred of us, just as Japan’s pre-emptive strike on Pearl Harbor united us in a determination to annihilate her empire?

What would the Dow Jones average look like after an attack on Iran?

Trump was nominated because he promised to keep us out of stupid wars like those into which folks like John Bolton and the Bush Republicans plunged us.

After 17 years, we are still mired in Afghanistan, trying to keep the Taliban we overthrew in 2001 from returning to Kabul. Following our 2003 invasion, Iraq, once a bulwark against Iran, became a Shiite ally of Iran.

The rebels we supported in Syria have been routed. And Bashar Assad—thanks to backing from Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and Shiite militias from the Middle East and Central Asia—has secured his throne.

The Kurds who trusted us have been hammered by our NATO ally Turkey in Syria, and by the Iraqi Army we trained in Iraq.

What is Trump, who assured us there would be no more stupid wars, thinking? Truman and LBJ got us into wars they could not end, and both lost their presidencies. Eisenhower and Nixon ended those wars and were rewarded with landslides.

After his smashing victory in Desert Storm, Bush I was denied a second term. After invading Iraq, Bush II lost both houses of Congress in 2006, and his party lost the presidency in 2008 to the antiwar Barack Obama.

Once Trump seemed to understand this history.

Pat Buchanan is a writer, political commentator and presidential candidate. He is the author of Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever and previous titles including The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority. Both are available from the AFP Online Store.